Reviews

Films

Alvin and the Chipmunks

Directed by Tim Hill; starring Jason Lee, Cameron Richardson, Jane Lynch, David Cross

This is a product of the lucrative franchise that began in the late 1950s with an irritatingly catchy Christmas song, electronically devised by Ross Bagdasarian and sung by the chirpy chipmunks Alvin, Simon and Theodore. In this live-action picture in which the animals are computer-generated, the irrepressible trio are bagged up in a giant Christmas tree brought by lorry to the foyer of a Los Angeles office block.

They escape by getting into a basket of biscuits carried by an unsuccessful composer (Jason Lee), whose house they wreck before turning his career around. The plot largely turns upon a record company impresario (David Cross) trying to lure his fellow rodents away from their human friend. Kids will love it.

St Trinian's

Directed by Barnaby Thompson and Oliver Parker; starring Rupert Everett, Emily Watson, Colin Firth, Russell Brand, Caterina Murino

One thing the UK's native film industry can do is produce comedies as witless and unfunny as anything Hollywood can turn out. Take Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson's St Trinian's.

It's an attempt to revive Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat's series inspired by Ronald Searle's marvellous St Trinian's cartoons depicting a girls' boarding school populated by gangsters in gymslips that began appearing in Lilliput immediately after the II World War and led to Searle being thought of as our answer to Charles Addams.

The first film, The Belles of St Trinian's (1954), is memorable for the appearance of Alastair Sim as the headmistress Millicent Fritton, a product of late Victorian society and high-minded liberal education, who rolls her eyes indulgently at the antics of her pupils. He also played her bookmaker brother. The subsequent films were feeble, especially the attempt to revive the series in 1980.

The latest St Trinian's, claimed as "the new classic British comedy", is raucous, leering, crude and largely misjudged, with Rupert Everett playing Miss Fritton as a coquettish transvestite with the manners of a Mayfair madam.

The attempts to shock us fail, though Cheltenham Ladies College may well be affronted to hear one of its teachers say "between you and I". But the preview was packed with girls aged from 7 to 14 who found it hilarious, though they did not laugh when Russell Brand affected to mishear the word "count".

Paranoid Park

Directed by Gus Van Sant; starring Gabe Nevins, Dan Liu, Jake Miller

There's nothing funny about Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, another of his cool looks at the strange conduct of affectless American teenagers. In this case, a 17-year-old boy living in Van Sant's old stamping ground of Portland, Oregon, and obsessed with skateboarding, has accidentally killed a security guard while trespassing in a railroad yard.

At the suggestion of a girlfriend, he writes an account of the experience as he recalls it, which, like Van Sant's Columbine-influenced film, Elephant, is in no particular order. The cinematography by Christopher Coyle and Rain Kathy Li achieves the chilly, detached mood the director is after.

The Guardian

(China Daily 01/02/2008 page20)